The laptop market in India has grown steadily in recent times, and quite a few newer players have made their presence felt. HP has been in the space for a very long time though, and its products range from budget-friendly to those that can hit your wallet hard. The HP Pavilion Plus 14 that I’m reviewing here comes across as your regular, everyday working companion and is priced affordably. It packs in the latest 12th-gen Intel CPU and is also backed by decent specs that are perfect for college or office work. The Pavilion 14 Plus represents a class of laptops for regular work or college use, and in this review let’s try to find out if this machine can become your daily companion.
Table of Contents
The lowdown
Talking about the build quality, the HP Pavilion Plus 14 offers similar design traits as previous iterations of the device. It has a sturdy and rigid chassis that has zero flex even when pressed hard during typing. The lid has HP branding present in the middle and the silver colour scheme of the device is carried across the full exterior of the laptop. Having a 14-inch panel makes the laptop relatively portable as does its weight of just 1.4kg. Aided by the fact that a regular USB Type-C smartphone adapter can power the laptop, the Pavilion 14 Plus slides easily into your backpack.
As for port selection, the laptop offers just enough I/O options for the user to play around with. There are two USB Type-C slots that can transfer at speeds of up to 10GB/s and also have DisplayPort and power delivery functionality. Apart from that you also get two USB 3.2 Type-A ports, an HDMI 2.1 slot, a microSD card reader, and a 3.5mm headphone plus microphone jack combo. For wireless connectivity options, you get Wi-Fi 6E AX211 and Bluetooth 5.2 support.
In terms of the display, the HP Pavilion Plus 14 has a 2.2K IPS LCD panel which, as the name suggests, measures 14-inches. The bezels surrounding the screen are relatively thin thanks to the 16:10 aspect ratio which provides for an expanded viewing experience. There’s an anti-glare coating on the panel which prevents hindrance from light sources shining directly behind you. However, it also masks a bit of the screen’s colour profile while the brightness levels are capped at 300nits. Even so, for this laptop’s primary usage, which is likely to be indoors, the display’s colour reproduction, viewing angles and luminosity served me well. A 5MP webcam is located on the top and can be considered pretty average in terms of visual output.
The keyboards on HP laptops have always been known to offer a stellar typing experience, especially the ones on its Spectre and Pavilion lineup. The same is carried over with the six-row, chiclet-style setup present on the Pavilion Plus 14. You get a satisfying amount of travel on the keys along with good response. The overall typing experience is quiet enough and I also like that the keys are not cramped up. The keyboard is, of course, backlit for easy usage in low light. As for the trackpad, it is nothing out of the ordinary. It does have a lot of surface area, decent latency and the feedback from clicking the buttons is tactile enough.
The Pavilion Plus 14 is powered by Intel’s 12th-gen i5 12500H chipset, which is also the only variant available for purchase. It can be said that for its price, the laptop performs as well as expected. My daily workload is not too processor-heavy and usually involves operating a dozen Chrome tabs across several windows. I also use Microsoft’s suite of apps like Word and Excelon a day-to-day basis. Apart from that Spotify almost always is running in the background and throughout all these cases, the Pavilion Plus 14 never once stuttered or lagged. You also get 16GB of DDR4 RAM and a 512GB PCIe NVMe SSD to contend with.
I have a few benchmark scores that show the HP Pavilion Plus 14 as a capable workhorse provided you do not go overboard in terms of graphical usage. The integrated Iris Xe graphics will serve as little help for anything more than light editing or gaming.
For audio, the dual-speakers tuned by Bang & Olufsen are decent enough for bingeing a few TV shows in a noise-free environment. Apart from that you also get biometric authentication via a fingerprint sensor which can be finicky at times and doesn’t work all that well. The battery life on the laptop is rated up to 11 hours via the 51Whr cell housed inside. It appears that those claims are a bit exaggerated as during my use, I got up to five hours of usage, which included watching some YouTube, and Netflix and writing this review. I expect most laptops in the segment to at least go for about seven to eight hours on a single charge. The Pavilion Plus 14’s battery can be charged by way of a 90W adapter provided inside the box that can juice up the cell in a little under two hours.
Verdict
The HP Pavilion Plus 14 is priced at Rs 79,999 on HP India’s official website which does make it a worthwhile contender in the laptop space. Of course, there are devices like the Xiaomi Notebook Pro 120G that undercut the Pavilion in terms of specs on paper. It also doesn’t help that I got lower battery life on HP’s offering than what most competing products offer. However, HP, as a household name in the PC market, does offer certain considerations like a robust customer support system among other things. Combined with the rigid build quality, a decent keyboard and a good display, the Pavilion Plus 14 has the potential of becoming your everyday work companion.
Editor’s rating: 3.5 / 5
Pros:
- Rigid construction
- Lightweight
- Decent performance
- Good keyboard
Cons:
- Undercut by competition
- Webcam could have been better
- Average battery life
